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In a recent article, Bill Brandon speculates that we’ve hit a tipping point in the workplace. Learning demands placed on workers have exceed workers’ capacity to meet them. In other words, we are inundating today’s workers with training and asking them to complete all of it while still maintaining high levels of productivity. This really struck a chord with me… because I see it happening again and again in our clients’ organizations.

I liked Brandon’s article and tweeted it out, saying it was a nice piece… and it was. However, I found myself going back to it and feeling like Brandon neglected a very important point. He advocated for us to think about three elements that all contribute to our accomplishments and performance in the workplace:

Brandon felt that if L&D professionals thought less in terms of “courses” and used the 70-20-10 “rule of thumb” to consider how to help someone build competence, then we’d be better off. (Caution flag here: 70-20-10 is NOT a proven model; it is described by the person who originally coined it as “folklore.” See page 5 of this journal article written by the originator of 70-20-10, Morgan McCall.) Brandon advocated that we embrace social learning and learning pathways as the means of reducing the stress and burnout so many are experiencing.

The Elephant in the Room

While I do not disagree that avenues other than courses can be hugely valuable in helping build people’s proficiencies, I realized that the article failed to mention the elephant in the stress/burnout room. The elephant is time, or rather lack thereof. Learning takes time, whether we do it informally or formally. In today’s workplaces, we’re pushing people to do more and more. We are failing to acknowledge what this “more and more” often means: we are asking people to go way beyond 40 hours in their work week to do the learning required to build and maintain proficiency and to do the work that contributes to company profits.

Harold Jarche had it right when he said that in today’s economy, work is learning and learning is the work. THAT is the model employers and employees have to get into our heads…that learning on the job is simply part of doing our jobs.

To manage stress and minimize burnout, we have to incorporate “learning curve” into the work people do. We have to factor this learning curve into the time things will take to complete and the amount someone will accomplish in a day or a week. And because people are constantly figuring out how to do something while they are working on their projects, we have to build in this constant “learning curve” into our expectations of what people will accomplish and how fast they will accomplish it.

In My Experience

I run a business and our formula for billable time is not 40 hours a week. Depending on the team member’s role, we estimate that 80% of their time can be devoted to billable tasks. The remainder is allocated to learning and administrative tasks. Giving people time to learn on the job is essential in an industry where we need to stay on the leading edge of what’s possible re: learning solutions. We have communities of practice that people are part of, we have weekly link-sharing and discussions, we have periodic all-company “demo-fests” where we share out projects with each other. On top of all that, we have periodic formal courses that people will attend to build skills in niche areas. All these things take time…in addition to the constant learning someone does in the course of executing projects.

So Bill Brandon, I most definitely agree that we can and should think beyond formal courses in helping people build proficiency. But we cannot do so – even via informal means – if we fail to acknowledge that we have to build the time in for people to learn. Even looking something up requires time.

#TalkTech is the “flipped” approach to Twitter chats. We publish all the topics a few hours before the chat so you can show up at 3 pm EST / 12 pm PST on Thursdays ready to discuss. We discuss three topics a week and the chat lasts around 30 minutes.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

Topic 1: Should kids be required to produce and program rather than simply consume?

President Obama endorses games.

Our team at BLP focuses heavily on game development and design… and we believe that learning games produce results. Now, President Obama has endorsed the practice of game playing among kids. In a recent live web chat on YouTube, Obama recalled an interaction with Mark Zuckerberg in which Zuckerberg claimed that he taught himself programming because he was interested in games. Obama went on to say that it will be necessary for up-and-coming generations to learn programming…and similar to Zuckerberg’s case, maybe that can come from games. What do you think? Should all kids learn how to program? Or, should they just keep convincing their parents that video games are not a waste of time?

“If we, as infants, develop through interaction, then tablets are our mental steroids.” At BLP, we believe that tablets create valuable learning experiences for everyone, including ourselves…almost all of us have iPads. We learn how to optimize the tablet to provide the best services possible for our clients. This article claims that tablets will make the human race smarter, from infants to geriatrics. Kids are learning how to touch before learning how to click, and adults use the tablet daily for on-demand information. Pretty soon, the tablet will replace the household TV and will be inundating schools worldwide…slowing and surely making us all more intelligent. What do you think? Can tablets make the human race as a whole smarter?

70-20-10 is a formulation that has, according to this article, gone viral in the training and development world. If 70% of what we learn is experiential, 20% is from others, and only 10% is formal, what does that mean for instructional designers and developers? Author Jay Cross claims that training isn’t going anywhere; it’s just going to look a lot different in a 24/7 business world surrounded by social media in which work is not as mechanical as it once was. What do you think? What role will training departments play in the future?

Most of us are curious about tomorrow (hence, our fascination with all the predictions for the upcoming year)… but we live in today. At BLP, we have plans to report on top training trends we see emerging in 2013, but we want to first step back and look at what’s happening (and not happening) now. We’ve set all the hype aside to look at what was really happening in the training world in 2012.

Here’s the sources we used to help formulate a picture of today:

Responses to Training Magazine’s Training Top 125 submission. Training’s Top 125 acknowledges the companies whose efforts in learning and development (L&D) stand out from the rest in terms of their impact on the winners’ bottom-line results.

The 2012 mLearning Report, published in May 2012, by eLearning Guild, the world’s oldest and largest “community of practice” for eLearning professionals.

Here’s four truths we gleaned from reviewing this data…plus two others gleaned from experience. A caveat as you read the truths: This is a bit like The Blind Men and the Elephant[1]. Perspective is never really objective; it depends on your vantage point. We tried to cull from several sources, but your experience could differ. Feel free to comment!

Truth #1: ILT is NOT dead.

If you just focused on what gets publicized and written about, you’d swear there wasn’t a stand-up instructor left in corporate America. Yet, if ASTD’s State of the Industry Report is accurate, then a lot of very big companies still heavily rely on instructor-led training. Submitters to Training’s Top 125 award are much more focused on eLearning than ILT…but they still do a significant amount of ILT!

Distribution method

ASTD State of the Industry Report

Training Top 125 respondents

Instructor-led – classroom

59.4%

31%

Instructor-led – online

8.75%

5%

Instructor-led – remote (satellite, video)

4.5%

Did not mention as category

Self-paced online

18.7%

69%

Mobile

1.4%

Did not mention as category

See Truth #2 and Truth #5 for potential reasons why this is.

Truth #2: mLearning is a lot like sex. Lots of folks talking about it. Far fewer actually doing it yet.

mLearning and all things mobile have been hot topics for at least three years. Given the amount of info you can get in a Google search on mLearning, you’d think it was THE dominant distribution method. But it’s not – and it’s not even close. The ASTD State of the Industry report had well over 400 respondents, all from very big companies. Yet only 1.4% of respondents indicated that mobile is a current distribution method. The eLearning Guild’s May 2012 report on mLearning yields higher percentages who have implemented or are in the design stages of a solution…but the % is still small. And the eLearning Guild’s member demographic is more niche than ASTD’s; the folks in eLearning Guild are technology-focused in most instances.

Here’s the data from eLearning Guild’s report on mobile:

What this means to you? You’ve still got time to figure out mLearnining and understand it. We love this great post from RJ Jacquez on what to be thinking about.

Truth #3: Outside vendors matter.

Really. The numbers in ASTD’s report back us up. Respondents shared that 30% of their L&D budget goes to external resources. They also report an average ratio of 315 company employees to every L&D employee. Take a very lean L&D organization and the need to serve a large population of employees and you get a need to supplement internal resources with external resources. Staying on top of trends and technologies in learning and development – and having the skill set to design with those technologies – gets tougher every day. Most companies are NOT in the L&D business; they are in business to do something else. Hence…the need for outside expertise.

What’s this mean to you? Vet vendors carefully and select people who can truly partner with you in supporting your L&D efforts. Selfishly for us, we advocate for vendors who stay on the leading edge and communicate clearly what’s possible today as well as what to be thinking about tomorrow.

Truth #4: We need to be more focused on the informal and on-the-job experiences people have.

31 hours. That’s the average amount of time ASTD’s survey respondents say an employee spends in formal training in a year’s time. That translates to 1.5% of someone’s work hours (assuming 2080 work hours in a year, which is 52 weeks x 40). The ASTD BEST award winners (a subset of respondents to the annual survey who have won an award similar to the Training Top 125 award) report more time in formal training – 49 hours or 2.3%.of work time.

Now consider this number: $1228. That’s the average amount of spend per employee inside the ASTD survey respondents’ organizations. Multiply that by, oh, 5,000 employees, and you see companies spending A LOT of money on formal training…which only occupies about 1.5% of someone’s time in a year. Hmmm….good value or no?

What’s this mean for you? If you are in L&D, you tend to think of training as REALLY important. The numbers, though, indicate that formal training cannot have nearly as much relevance or criticality as on-the-job experiences, access to “just-in-time” resources that help employees do their jobs, and access to informal learning opportunities. Pay attention to all those posts on social learning and informal learning. Figure out how to cultivate those opportunities inside your organizations – and create the tools/make tools available for employees.

Disclaimer: Truth #5 and Truth #6 come from our experience…not any of the reports in the industry. So here goes…

Truth #5: The majority of eLearning – in reality – is pretty painful to go through and poorly designed.

At the start of a project, clients ALWAYS say they want something that is “engaging” and not too content-heavy. They say they are focused on outcomes. Yet – when you ask a subject matter expert or requester of training what they want people to know or do after training – or what problem they are trying to solve, they can go strangely silent. They revert to listing what they want to include in a course…not what they want learners to GET OUT of a course.

The result, of course, becomes “text and next” with tons of content and little relationship to any behaviorally based outcomes. The consequence is eLearning courses that are painful to take for anyone other than the subject matter expert who wanted all the content put in. Worse, the people taking them actually don’t learn anything in many cases…meaning the investment in creating the course was wasted!

What’s this mean for you? As L&D professionals, we need to do better in our conversations with those requesting eLearning…and we need to advocate for ourselves and what we bring to the table. No company wants to waste money or waste employee’s time. Bad eLearning does both..and it fuels Truth #1 – which is continuing with ILT. Many a client has told us, “Oh, we HATE eLearning. We need to stick with ILT. People like it better.” (Note – no comments on whether one format or another yields better ROI, just “people like it better.”)

Truth #6: Very Few People Actually Pull Data From the LMS… but They All Believe They Need the Data.

Being able to access and use data is great… but only if you will, well, access and use the data. In the majority of organizations we work in, we NEVER see our clients go back to pull data or evaluate results. Yet almost all clients insist that their courses be SCORM-compliant and reside inside an LMS. Companies spend huge sums of money purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading LMS systems…and don’t really appear to use the data gathering and reporting functionality they are paying big dollars to have. To us, this simply seems like a waste of money.

I always feel like I’m the kid in the fairy tale “The Emperor Who Had No Clothes” when I attempt to point this out, however. No one wants to hear, “I don’t think that the LMS that you spend $1M on is really giving you value because you aren’t using it to do anything other than serve as a course repository.”

What’s this mean for you? Before embarking on the LMS journey or agreeing to major upgrades or investments in a new system, address the elephant in the room and ask, “What’s the ROI of this investment in the LMS? How are we using it? What do we do with the data?” What happens if we do NOT use an LMS? What’s the alternative?

Got any other truths that I missed? I could have included truths about games and gamification (my favorite topic as I’m passionate about the value of learning games), video in training, and a few others…but I need to save some stuff for next week’s emerging trends and technologies post!

Due to budget restrictions many people are tackling projects on their own, including everything from home improvement, car repairs, landscaping, and yes, even corporate learning. DIY in corporate learning is a growing trend and from what I’m hearing, it’s gaining momentum.

Where’s Eric Stromer when you need him?DIY should be taken on with a grain of caution. Eric Stromer is the host on HGTV’s Over Your Head – he rescues overwhelmed homeowners on their DIY projects. Sometimes, I’m afraid when I watch shows like this – do you ever wonder what might be lurking behind your walls thanks to an overzealous DIYer? Do you think DIY in learning is a good thing? Last fall I reported in SMEs as Developers that I had some trepidation in this area. I could envision endless content dumps, limited structure, and confused learners. While a SME on their own as content developer still makes me nervous. For the most part if you have the know-how and the time then go for it. As long as we all can recognize when to call a pro. In an upcoming kitchen project, I know my husband and I can do some demo, drywall, and painting, but we’ll need to call an electrician for some electrical work. In developing learning solutions, maybe you can do the analysis but need help with the design. Or perhaps your content is brilliant but you need help implementing appropriate technology. The point is to leverage resources in the most effective means possible.

Web 2.0 – Ripe for DIY
Web 2.0 is an area that I think is perfect for DIY learning. By nature, the informality readily facilitates capturing and sharing organizational knowledge. User generated content requires less time and intervention from L&D since all employees are responsible for the content. Although, L&D ought to play a role in the architecture and implementation of Web 2.0 tools. I came across a quote in the Chief Learning Officer article Five Learning Trends for 2009that puts this point of DIY into perspective. The article quotes Allison Anderson, manager of learning innovations and technology at Intel, as she comments on the need for rapidity in knowledge sharing, “Because of this immediacy, learners must have access to dynamic content from the best experts, whether they are in the next cube or half a world away. To get to the best content and the right expert, employees must be contributors, as well as consumers, of learning content. The training group no longer can be the only funnel for knowledge or dictate the way each individual employee learns.”(1)

In closing, whatever path you take in developing the best learning solutions for your organization recognize the options and resources available to you and don’t hesitate to ask for help.

We started the month talking about the features and functions of learning management systems. It’s only fitting we end talking about the changes the future holds for those features. Soon, it won’t be enough that the LMS tracks formal learning like instructor-led training courses or e-learning modules; the future is here, and learning management systems are changing rapidly to keep up.

Leanne talked about Moodle’s ability to categorize those on the system by their expertise in her last post. In a sense, she saw the LMS as more like a social network and less like a database. In this online community, learners can create their own “real” with profiles and list their experience; by searching the profiles, learners can use the LMS to contact others for help and support in a specific subject area.

According to a July trend report published by T&D,

“Within the next two years, 45 percent of respondents say they will upgrade their existing learning portal and 14 percent plan to launch a new learning portal. Most respondents use all of the 12 major learning tools and technologies listed on the survey in their portals. These include blogs, online coaching, polls, self-study programs, communities of practice, and more.”

Instead of discussion forums, these new learning management systems provide blogs and wikis to foster collaboration. And in the place of multiple-choice and true/false tests, more complex polling features keep learners engaged. With the addition of informal learning opportunities, hopefully, learners will stop thinking of the LMS as “the place to go to get to the training” and start viewing it as “where I can find what I need to know.” The LMS becomes a true repository for learning, housing job aids, coaching guides, and courses, along side videos created and uploaded by learners and informal wikis run by study groups.

In researching LMSs and Moodle, I found an article that discussed combining an LMS with a virtual learning environment, Second Life. When I dug a little further, I found Sloodle. It uses Moodle to generate a 3D version of the LMS in Second Life. Want to decide what course to take? Look at the sessions displayed on a calendar in Second Life and “teleport” yourself to the classroom immediately. Sounds like something out of a science fiction novel.

I’m not sure I can even imagine the future of learning management systems; I just know they will very soon be much more than a database that assigns coursework.

Last week I hosted a webinar called “Come Moodle with Us: Straight Talk on Moodle as an LMS Solution.” Along with two of my colleagues at BLP, we showed attendees OUR Moodle site – and attempted to illustrate many of the cool features Moodle provides and how Moodle facilitates informal learning and not just functions as a place to house and track e-learning. If you’d like a copy of our session slides – or a link to our Moodle site, please feel free to sownload my notes: moodle_08272009_sessionnotes.

A few “highlights” that I want to share:

1) Moodle is about creating a learning community. Those who want to use it just to track learning are missing its point. In our case, it connects all the employees in our organization to each other. Our employees can now easily locate other resources inside the organization who can help them with a variety of things such as instructional design, Flash development, game design, simulations, etc.

2) Moodle CAN host e-learning courses….but it can do so much more. Example: I created a “course” in Moodle called Adobe Max. Six of our employees are going to the Adobe Max conference in October; by creating a course using the “social” format in Moodle, I am setting up a way for them to share learning on specific topics (i.e. After Effects, Acrobat, CS4, etc). Also – I can give many, many people the ability to become course creators. If you have something you want to teach someone else, Moodle can let you set up a course and do it!

3) Moodle can provide a company-wide calendar of learning events that everyone can see. This is a simple feature…and yet one we didn’t have before.

4) Moodle can make it easy for me to post links to great blogs – and to get everyone in our organization blogging. Even better, I can create assignments within courses to blog on specific topics (such as learning to work in a virtual environment.) The blogger can create tags that make it very easy for other employees to find posts on topics of interest (such as working in a virtual environment).

5) Moodle makes it super-easy to share rich media. Links to our YouTube channel are embedded on our company’s front page. I can share any video from YouTube…or other video-sharing sites. I could also share photos from Flicker, etc.

6) I can help people acquire our BLP lingo by setting up a glossary. Our glossary lets people rate the entries for their value. Employees can also add to or edit glossary entries. Even better, the posts show the author’s picture and provide a link to the author so people can get in touch with the author if they’d like.

Moodle is going to be a major help to us in developing employees and fostering informal learning. I think many organizations could find it to be an answer to their quest for facilitating learning throughout their organizaton. My goal is to help people “discover” Moodle.

I read yesterday that during times of economic recession people actually become healthier. The reason is that during fiscally tight times people tend to drink and smoke less to save money. They also head outdoors for lower cost and healthier entertainment such as hiking. Yesterday on the BLP LOL Live webinar about Moodle, we heard that quite a few organizations are interested in Moodle due to budget constraints. As Lisa pointed out in her post Leveraging Learning, informal learning is gaining popularity at least in part due to the economic crunch as some organizations can’t or won’t pay for a formal learning solution.

Implementing Moodle as an LMS or social networking as a tool for sharing knowledge still has a learning curve and costs associated with them. They’re not necessarily easy to implement. The implementation process will take time and require new learning by staff. BLP invested 160 hours to set up our Moodle site, load three courses and 16 users. The folks on the project learned a lot along the way and at the end of the day we have quite a nice tool for a relatively low cost. Likewise designing and implementing an informal learning solution is new territory for most organizations. It will take time to properly design it and educate users as to how to use it. However, you gain a cost effective and useful tool. One of my favorite options on Moodle is the ability to identify a peer by area of expertise. I remember a manager once complained how she spent an hour and a half making five phone calls to find the person who could help her use the company’s accounting software. It would have been nice if she could have performed a two second search to locate the right person or search a discussion board that may have had the answer to her question.

By saving money and increasing the utility of new tools we can stay financially fit and implement effective solutions. I’d like to hear your stories. How has the need to tighten the budget helped you develop solutions that make your company or department fiscally fit while improving knowledge sharing?

You may be familiar with the concept of unschooling. Unchooling is essentially the idea that an educational system which is founded on the age of industrialism trains students to achieve in only a strict narrow focus. The lack of freedom in choosing the path of education and the constraints of focusing on what is deemed important by industry or society, squashes creativity (check out An Unschooling Manifesto). Ewan McIntosh on edu.blog laments that the failure of a factory style, one size fits all education became “depressingly clear” when an elementary aged child expressed his sole learning goal was to “get a five”. A five I presume to be the highest score on some standardized test. Gone is the ability to express free thoughts or articulate a higher level goal for learning than to “get a five”. Proponents of unschooling argue that the output of our education is people unable to operate without strict regimens and parameters. In contrast, an education where students are free to create, find their talents and focus on what they enjoy and our naturally good at creates people who are more confident, creative and entrepreneurial.

So this got me thinking about organizational learning. If 70-80% of an employee’s learning occurs through informal networks and people do learn without a learning intervention, do we really need to put more structure around these informal networks? The corporate side of me wants to put a framework and structure around informal learning. After all, unfocused, misdirected learning is a road to inefficiency – right? Or wrong – is it actually a road to discovery, creativity, and self confidence? Should we unschool our corporate learning and how much do we unschool it?

In business we like to say we give freedom to team members; set them loose to identify creative solutions; “think outside the box”. However, getting outside the box at work has risks associated with it. When you step outside the box you may come against deeply ingrained corporate culture, you risk ridicule, failure. Is the message people hear more like … think outside the box, but don’t go too far outside the box, at least be anchored to the box? If I think about applying structure and framework to informal learning, am I really saying to put a box around it, so that everyone feels safe, but little is actually gained? Where do the entrepreneurial ideas come from if people aren’t confident in expressing new ideas or they aren’t free to discover things on there own? I don’t know, I’m note even sure this is a valid fear, but it’s definitely something to ponder.

How much structure is the right amount? Is the best thing we can do for informal learning to just get out of the way? What is the best path to effective learning without inhibiting discovery?

I’ve read some interesting posts and web articles lately on topics that are relevant to formal and informal learning.

1) Line length and readability/comprehension online

For years, I abided by the rule that users (aka learners in my setting) liked reading text that was formatted into lines of about 4 inches in length. Longer line lengths reduced comprehension. Well, now I am not so sure. I reviewed a study done on line length and reading comprehension. Turns out a really long line length of 10 inches may be better than the 4 inches I thought was best. People’s eyes have to switch back to the next line less often if the lenght is longer, which decreases the number of momentary losses of concentration as their eyes go from the end of one line to the start of the next. If you go too short, then comprehension really drops. (Keep that in mind when you try to squeeze more and more words in a feedback box that is only 2-inches wide!)

I’m really curious about this so I came up with a rather poorly designed survey (designed in 30 minutes) to see people’s preferences and to see if they comprehend a narrower paragraph better than they do a wider one. Click here if you are willing to take my survey. It’s quick/dirty and not at all scientific, but I think it will be interesting to see what folks say. I’ll post the results next week.

2) Participation in informal learning (wikis, blogs, etc).

Tony Karrer wrote about the 90-9-1 rule in his blog post last week. This rule pretty much mirrors the adage about email or mass marketing efforts, which says you have to send out 100 emails or direct mail pieces to get a single response. With social media, you have 100 subscribers to your blog, wiki, or whatever to get 1 person to regularly contribute. According to Karrer, who bases HIS information on lots of other research that he cites,

90 will lurk (read with no active participation)

9 will participate in a limited fashion (maybe rate or comment periodically)

1 will regularly post content

This has big implications for organizations who tout informal learning as the new means of knowledge managment (remember all the communities of practice of a few years ago…and the lack of people participating in them????). Respondents to Karrer’s post (clearly he has LOTS of people viewing his blog!) had interesting views. One commenter pointed out that the 90-9-1 rule may change with a new generation of digital natives who are more comfortable commenting and participating in social networks than the baby boomers were participating in older forms of knowledge management and sharing.

We shall see! Informal learning will succeed or fail based on the level of participation in it.

In the meantime, I’ll let you know how many participants I get in my very unscientific line length survey. Whether you choose to base your e-learning screen layouts on my information will be up to you!

The commonly quoted percentage of learning that is “informal” is 75% of what we learn. (See Marcia Connor’s online article on Informal Learning to see the research on this.) Connor explains, “Most learning doesn’t occur during formal training programs. It happens through processes not structured or sponsored by an employer or a school. Informal learning is…what happens the rest of the time.” She goes on to explain that companies invest all their $$ and time in creating formal learning programs when informal learning is where companies are going to get the most bang for their buck.

Connor further distinguishes between what is intentional learning and accidental learning with this helpful graphic:

Notice that she categorizes “informal” and yet “intentional” learning as that which occurs via community, teaming, and playing. There is also informal, yet”accidental” learning that comes from self-study, exploring, and Internet surfing. This intentional learning is going to come from blogs, social networks, project opportunities as work, and interactive opportunities (i.e. playing). So far…she’s got me until I start wondering how much social networking any of us can support.

The concept of informal learning is quite the rage these days as everyone talks about Web 2.0’s ability to make informal learning easier. While I myself am very jazzed by the various Web 2.0 applications I see, I’m starting to have my doubts as to how easily these applications will make informal learning EASIER. As I’m getting inundated with requests to join this or that social network, I’m starting to wonder if all these social communities designed to foster informal learning are going to make us opt out entirely.

After all, how many social networks can you be active in? Right now, I’m in four…and only active in one of the four. I’m part of Facebook, LinkedIn, Learning Town, and a more local community called Smaller Indiana. I’ve spent time in each one – and found great nuggets each place – but I cannot be an active participant in all of them. I “dabble” rather than dive deep.

Companies who see informal learning as the Holy Grail that will eliminate the need for expensive, formal training need to think carefully. Informal learning IS largely what self-motivated people do. Often, this description of “self-motivated” is not one that fits the profile of people who come to formal learning opportunities. If an “informal” forum exists, a non-motivated learner isn’t likely to seek it out even if it exists. A self-motivated employee likely will…if he/she can find informaton easily. If various departments and pockets all set up their own social networks – or create collaboaration sites – suddenly we’ve created a nightmare for employees who are drowning in information. We’ve bombarded them with STUFF…much of which they won’t have time to use.

Companies need to give careful, planned consideration to how they want informal learning to take place in their organizations – at least the part of it that involves online communities. One or two are great…there is a huge drop-off in ability to participate beyond that point. The same truth goes with blogs…exactly how many blogs can you keep up with? (Hopefully, this is one you conisder to be a “must-read!”). Again – planned consideration is the key. Creating a bazillion sites and blogs – just because it’s easy to do – sets companies up for disappointment.

As always, I’m interested in views that either contradict or support my own. Tell us what you think of the sudden interest in informal learning…and social networks as a means to facilitate it?